P R Satheesh’s show starts conversations about the complexities of life’s multiple frameworks

From Munnar in Kerala to Mumbai—an artist takes conventional stereotypes—breaks them and finds ways of creating permutations and combinations that create a synergy of Pollockian canvasses filled with conversations about the complexities of life's multiple frameworks. You get the cramped in convolutions of the brilliant artist P R Satheesh who was discovered by Kochi Biennale founder Bose Krishnamachari. Satheesh's show Frenetic opens at Galerie Mirchandani and Steinruecke Mumbai on October 23, 2019, and it will charm art lovers into its matrix of meanderings.

P.R. Satheesh, Untitled (Drawing 1), 2015, pen and ink on paper, 60x 44 inches

Nature as Inspiration

A native of the mountainous region of Munnar in Kerala, experiencing the stark realities of farmland conflict and stirring wilderness, P.R. Satheesh views his relationship with nature and its creatures as the primary inspiration for his work. His family's decision to move to a cardamom plantation during his childhood, away from civilisation and familiar terrain, produced in him a bond with these surroundings.

Untitled-lll,-2015,-Acrylic-on-canvas,-5ft-x-12-ft-(triptych)

After graduating from art school in Trivandrum and practicing as a full time artist for some years, Satheesh moved back to the farm, continuing his studio practice there, while also earning his livelihood as a farmer. Childhood memories seeped into his work. The artist recalls his daily walk to school through the forest adjoining the family's farmland. The instinctive, vibrant, and frenetic nature of his art is manifest in the six wall-sized paintings which will be on view in this exhibition.

Multiple Materials

At first it's a cornucopia of colours, but look closer and you sense the use of natural pigments, watercolour, as well as oil paint to get into the synergy that fills every square inch of space on his large canvases. The canvasses he has said are a well spring of memories and experiences born out of his walks through the wooded forest adjoining his farmland at midnight.

P.R. Satheesh, Untitled I, 2017-18, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 96 x 216 inches (triptych)

In Kerala's lush tropicana, the dense thicket of evergreen trees and natural sounds have their own animation in the darkness, while nocturnal animals peer through the thick vegetation with glowing eyes. Satheesh's journey is implicit discipline and concentration—you can sense the application of many layers of paints as well as an intuitive ideology that drives and disciplines his process.

Heartfelt Creations

The canvas is a crowd of free-flowing forms that mirror endless emotions and infinite images. Satheesh says that his style has evolved over years due to research and an unconscious effort. “It just evolved, and I can relate it with my own life and my childhood memories, fear, chaos and loneliness. While I paint, I transcend into the other world, play with paint on the canvas. Nature has been always my inspiration, the transient physicality around mess something I never trusted. It is philosophical perhaps but I connect everything around me with nature.”

P.R. Satheesh, Untitled (Drawing 6), 2018, Indian ink on paper,37 x 26.7 in

Satheesh displays a fascinatingly dense, intricate and animated Neo abstract surface—which reveals an extraordinary mastery over a radical new medium of filling in the smallest fragment of space with the richest and most engaging looped strokes of infinite combinations. You can see that he creates completely freeform complex veil-like surface of drips, and drags and splashes and spills. He harnesses a free-flowing spirit of automatism to create a surreal as well as avant-garde language that makes us think of a universal code of figurative calligraphy as well as the script of all languages that both distinguish as well as overlay his work of this period.

P.R. Satheesh, Untitled (Drawing 3), 2017, Indian ink on paper, 41 x 27 inch

由memorie爬行混乱的图像s you see an inherent search, and you recall his words, “Actually my works are serendipitous, and I can relate them to my life. These elements and images pop up in my works as part of an unconscious process, and I try in as many ways to find a connectivity as well as decipher their many meanings .”

Personal Journals

The drawings too are like small annotations from a personal diary of archives. The figures at once doodled and rambling reflective of deeper inner urges traverse and transcend both realities and dreams, and memories and readings. It is as if the artist draws the mistakes and the meanings all at once. The reflective aura of thoughts and emotions all combine to create a convolution of tales. In the freeing of emotive evocations, Satheesh creates drawings that have a ritualistic appeal for their universality of imagery.

P.R. Satheesh, Untitled (Drawing 2), 2015, pen and ink on paper, 60 x 44 inches

The show serves as a repository of resonance born out of the artist's holistic as well as ritualistic realities of everyday living. The relatively simple features of Satheesh's comparatively unorthodox manner of painting have a profound impact on the mind of the viewer and therein lies the enigma and the elegance. In the altered alchemy of memories and the mapping of colour and strokes we gain an insight into the organic intensity, the unending energy and the aura of experiences arrested in space.

Frenetic at Gallerie Mirchandani and Steinrucke runs till December 31st 2019

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